A Friday in August

Ian C. Nelson, Librarian Emeritus, former Assistant Director of
Libraries (University of Saskatchewan) and dramaturge (Festival de la
Dramaturgie des Prairies).

Poet, essayist, musician, and independent filmmaker Antonio D’Alfonso
co-founded the review Vice Versa. Also founder and president of
Toronto-based Guernica Editions, writing in Italian, French, and
English, he is a popular lecturer in multicultural subjects. In 1995, he
himself adapted his novel Avril ou l’anti-passion (1990) into English
under the title Fabrizio’s Passion. In 2004, Un vendredi du mois
d’aoыt, the second volume of the trilogy—published here in a
translation by Jo-Anne Elder—received Ontario’s Trillium award.

The hero of this succinct yet lyrical piece is a filmmaker (again
Fabrizio Notte) who makes documentaries on hit-men and shares
autobiographical place of birth (Montreal) and artistic residence
(Toronto) with the author. The narrator’s inclusion in a Montreal film
festival calls into question his identity (who exactly is the man he has
become?) and his artistic integrity (he is savaged publicly by a critic,
both an old comrade and once a momentary rival in the bed of his third
wife). Even before this critical humiliation, Fabrizio has been set off
kilter by a chance encounter with his brother-in-law, Peter, in the
course of an armed robbery. His return to Montreal includes an evocative
excursion along the “eleven emotional sections” of rue Saint
Laurent, eventually leading the narrator to face the fact that he cannot
help loving two women at the same time: one, his wife, a doctor in
family practice, now distant and taken up with their daughter; and the
other, an inaccessible woman from his past. The intrigue is layered in
short, choppy sentences that often end in a statement of paradox. The
documentary narrator is relentlessly present and sharp in his
observations, but with a poet’s sense of fine distinctions: “I have
the impression that I am in the arms of another woman […] the
more-than-woman […] I am, therefore, intrinsically an unfaithful
partner.” Although gradually we become aware of the arc of this
character’s life, the intrigue is far from linear. Readers are
privileged to accompany the protagonist as he tries to “reconstruct
little islands of facts and bridge them together.”